


An Inconvenient Gift

by Catchclaw



Series: Mental Mimosa [272]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: 1970s, An Alternative Take on Endgame, Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Cunnilingus, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Have I Mentioned How Much I Hate Endgame?, Howard Stark's A+ Parenting, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Making up for lost time, Multi, Mutual Pining, Penetrative Sex, Silver Fox Peggy Carter, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-18
Updated: 2019-09-03
Packaged: 2020-05-14 03:10:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 7,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19264735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: It happens like this: they fail. It doesn’t matter how; it doesn’t matter why. But they do.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: A 3AM thought--how would I write Tony/Steve/Peggy?

It happens like this: they fail. It doesn’t matter how; it doesn’t matter why. But they do.

Later, when enough years have passed that Tony can reflect without bitterness, he’ll wonder if the universe was sending them a message, time after fucking time, which was: sit down, shut up, and _live_.

It wasn’t something either of them were particularly good at. Steve, the man of perpetual motion, and him, a brain with legs and a fifty dollar smile that was wired the same way; it was hard for him to wind down ever, to get his brain to zip it long enough for him to get good solid rest. It’s worst, at first, in the past.

But then, after a couple of years of futility, of tinkering and chasing and fake mustaches, of cursing 70s tech and the Bee Gees on the radio, of hope leaking slowly away, Steve gets a brilliant idea: they’ll tell Peggy. One of the few people in the world they’ve actively had to hide from who just happens to work _with Tony’s dad_ : yeah sure, Rogers, we’ll stroll right into her office and spill the _hey we’re time travellers!_ beans.

“And ask for help,” Steve says, his face placid and serious. “We can’t do this on our own, Tony.”

Tony curls closer and rucks up the sheets, closes his eyes against the warm spread of Steve’s neck. “What if she freaks the fuck out? What if she doesn’t believe us?” He shudders. “Worse, babe, what if she does?”

“Then we’ll have a fighting chance of getting back, that’s what. If anybody in this whole crazy world will have our back, it’s her.” A chuckle, a long, solid squeeze. “Or your dad.”

“Fuck no. I don’t care what anybody said about paradoxes not being a thing; I’m not risking this whole thing going Marty McFly.”

Steve yawns and reaches out, snaps off the bedside lamp, settles the room into darkness. “I missed that one. Is it from a movie?”

“Yeah, remind me. I’ll tell you about it sometime. It’ll come out in about a decade. If we’re still here, I’ll take you.”

“Mmmm,” Steve says. His lips brush Tony’s forehead. “Don’t worry. We won’t be.”

In the end, they decide not to crash Peggy’s office. They’ve spent too much time over the years sneaking on and off that damn base. No, they visit her at home. Ring her doorbell and everything, right there in goddamn New Jersey, and when she opens the door, Walter Cronkite is on the TV behind her and she’s sort of brandishing a gun.

The first few moments are tricky. It gets easier after that.

When she sees Steve, really sees him, first under the porchlight and then inside in her living room, her face is the portrait of absolute heartbreak and joy and then love, thick and shining. Love. Love.

But she doesn’t loosen her grip on the gun. Not until Steve says her name again softly, until he peels off his cap and smiles, this lopsided little thing; a hint, Tony thinks, of the kid he used to be, and then and only then does she lay the pistol on the coffee table without taking her eyes off of him and then Steve’s holding her and she’s holding him and her shoulders are shaking and Steve’s eyes, when they find Tony’s over the top of her head are damp and incredibly bright.

Tony isn’t surprised when Peggy kisses Steve, but he’s surprised when Steve kisses her back.

He makes himself scarce in the kitchen for a while, running his fingers over the neat formica counters, the carefully arranged pots and pans. Not one damn thing there is out of place. Except, he thinks ruefully, with a flair of the old unfamiliar green--except him.

“So you’re Howard’s son?” Peggy says later, when she’s fixed her lipstick and Steve’s dried his eyes. “Really?” She squints at him and smiles, a pretty quirk of her lips. “Well, Anthony, I’m glad to see my godson turned out so well.”

“Huh?” Tony says in the same instant Steve wheezes: “ _What_?”

She looks at them like they’ve both just had a stroke. “I’m your godmother,” she says. “I was there at your christening--unlike your father, but let’s set that aside. I promised before God and everybody to offer you my guidance and counsel, help you make your way through the word.” She frowns. “Hang on, did I not do it then, where you came from? When you came from. Was I not there for you?”

Tony swallows, feels a swoop of old, tired anger. “Ma’am, until today, when I come from, we’ve never met.”

Peggy’s face goes full fury, zero to oh shit just like that, and god help anybody, Tony thinks, who was ever foolish enough to stand in her way. “I,” she says precisely, “am going to do everything in power to help you get back if only so I can tagalong with you and kick Howard Stark’s ass.”

“Oh,” Tony says to Steve later, when they’re crowded together in the shower, “I can see how you could fall in her love with her, babe. So fucking easy.”

“She scared the piss of out most people, back in the day.”

Tony leans back into the soapy hum of Steve’s fingers, tries to forget the way Steve had sighed when their mouths met, the way those big hands had looked spread over the curve of Peggy’s back. “Yeah. Exactly.”

 

****  


Over the coming months, two things become clear to Tony: Peggy’s assistance is invaluable, the best they could have hoped for. It’s also not enough.

Ok, twist his arm; there are three. The third being: the love of his life is in love with the girl he left behind, but she’s not a girl anymore and her reserve of hesitation is minimal, at best.

They don’t hide their relationship from her. How could they? Especially once she makes a wholly logical and completely transparent case for them to move in with her. They cart over their mountains of papers and buckets of electronic knick knacks and she gives them the guest bedroom and shows them where she keeps the laundry soap and the trash bags and the guns. Tony spreads out in the basement, where she’s already got a bit of a lab, and Steve makes his nest in the den, books everywhere, stacked neatly, papers arranged in diligently-labeled boxes that when the curtains are open and the sun shining in, he’s careful to keep out of sight.

It makes sense for them to have a central operating base, as Peggy calls it. Really, it does. But it also does not with a capital D because in the small hours of the night when Steve is inside him, murmuring pretty nonsense against his cheek while shoving in and in and in, Tony can’t forget who’s on the other side of the wall, what she can hear if she’s listening: the grunt of Steve’s breath and the high whine of his own. The steady, unmistakable creak of the bed. In the morning, when they’re sitting at the kitchen table like civilized people talking quantum mechanics and the fluid nature of the time stream, Tony watches Peggy drink coffee, eat grapefruit and toast, and wonders if she’d awakened the night before and heard them moaning and wound her fingers over her breasts and between her thighs and imagined that she was the one Steve was fucking, her body the one that was making him sound like that, her hands braced on his biceps as he tucked their foreheads together and came and came and came.

“Anthony, you’re staring.”

“What?”

He blinks and Peggy’s got an eyebrow raised at him, her knife poised over a new slice of toast. “You went full fathom stare there,” she says. “What, have I got jam on my face?”

He stammers something and hides behind his coffee cup. It’s fine. The conversation moves right along.

But his mind, the bastard that it is, won’t let the idea go once it’s clamped its jaws around it. They kiss sometimes, she and Steve; a little peck in the morning, marmalade-flavored, or a smooch on the cheek goodnight. No more sweet lingering things like the first day they’d come, when they’d found each other, each touch of their lips peeling back one of those long, lost years. But that spark between them hasn’t gone anywhere, oh no, it’s just ticked up into a higher, unrequited key, and the longer Tony lives with them, the more time the three of them spend together, the more the green in him softens, sweetens, like a pint of Ben & Jerry’s (fuck, hurry up and invent yourself, damn it!) left out in the afternoon sun. Steve loves him, he knows that, and when they got tossed here, they’d only just gotten each other back. He remembers that ache, that cherry pit of emptiness; through all their arguments, their stupid separation, he’d _missed_ Steve so goddamn much that some days, he thought he would choke.

He looks at Peggy, cool, beautiful, brilliant Peggy, and mentally compounds his, what, three or four years of angst with by several decades and jesus, he can’t imagine what that must have felt like, what it must feel like, because here she has this man she adored living in her house and smiling at her and not making love to her every goddamn fucking day and how her heart isn’t in ashes on the fucking floor, Tony has no earthly idea.

And they’re gorgeous together. That’s the killer. The silver strands in her hair and the dark blond of his, when they’re closer together. The fight in her eyes, the shine, when she looks at him; the softness--dear fucking god, it kills him--that Steve’s drown in when he looks at her.

They can’t spent all of their time fighting the good fight, the two of them, can they? Can’t spend this extra time, this inconvenient gift from the universe, denying what they feel on Tony’s behalf.

No, he decides one evening while he’s washing the dishes, while they’re in the den watching Cronkite, hell no. He won’t let them mess up this chance, too. All they need is the right kind of push.


	2. Chapter 2

He waits until late. That’s the first thing.

He waits until a night when they’ve been hard at it all day, all of them: tinkering and arguing and throwing sand in each other’s gears. A spinning their wheels sort of day.

He waits until they’re sitting in the living room not talking to each other. He and Peggy are drinking good scotch. Steve isn’t. He’s sort of slumped against the side of the sofa rubbing the sides of his temples like he’s got a bitch of a headache coming on.

“‘S the light bothering you, babe?”

“Mmmm,” Steve says unhelpfully. Tony chooses to read that as a yes.

He reaches over and switches off the lamp on the side table and the room tumbles into gray with only the streetlight to cut it in those few strips the curtains don’t touch.

He’s in the wingback and Peggy and Steve are on opposite sides of the sofa, not touching, 100% of their decorum precisely in place as it has been since the day that he and Steve rang the bell. Well, Tony thinks, downing the last of his drink and ignoring the burn, the knot of nerves that’s a stone in his gut. Enough’s enough of that shit, thank you.

He gets up and walks the three steps to Peggy’s side of the couch. “Hey, ma’am,” he says. “Any room on that boat for one more?”

She tips her face up towards him. The shadows catch the edge of her chin. “There can be.”

“Thanks.”

Peggy slides over, the ice in her drink tinkling, and Tony knows when she bumps against Steve because they both startle at little, give up a soft little sound. 

“My apologies,” Peggy says.

“No,” Steve’s saying as Tony sits. “You’re fine.”

It’s a tight fit, no question, the three of them on that couch. There’s not a lot of inches left for personal space. Tony’s knee bumps against Peggy’s, the scrape of her trousers meeting the rough of his jeans, and she’s warm where their shoulders meet. He likes the way her silk blouse feels against his bare arm.

And she’s trembling. Nothing major, no tiny earthquakes or anything, but she’s definitely on edge. The right kind of uneasy. He can hear the quick trip of her breath.

“Kind of shitty day, huh?” He sounds calmer than he feels.

“Yeah,” Steve says. “We’ve had a lot of those lately.”

“We’ll get there.” Peggy’s voice is quiet, confident. “Between the three of us, gentlemen, even the mysteries of the time stream can’t stand.” She leans against Tony a little, her body a warm, pleasant weight. Huh. He does his best not to jolt in surprise.

“Do you really believe that?”

She turns her face and smiles at him; even in the dark, he can feel it. “Have I ever lied to you, Tony?”

“No,” he says without hesitation, because from the word go, she’s been transparent: about her connections, about what she can and can’t do, about all that she still feels for Steve. Maybe not using words for that last part, but she’s never, Tony realizes with her curls brushing his face, tried to hide it from him. From either of them.

His arm is around her shoulders. He’s not sure how it got there. Nor is he sure when her hand found his leg.

She squeezes there, kneads her fingers on him like a cat. “Then I shan’t start now, hmm?”

“Peachy,” he manages. “Me, either. Let’s try for three. Steve?”

“What?”

“You’ve never lied to Peggy, have you?”

A sigh, a kind of tired hesitation. “Not since we’ve been here, no.”

“So, like the lady says, let’s not start now, huh?”

“Tony,” Steve says, reed thin, “I’m tired. I don’t want--”

“To come over here and kiss Peggy? Sure you do. And then you’re gonna kiss me.”

Peggy stiffens against him and her nails dig in deep but she doesn’t run, Tony can’t help but notice. She doesn’t run or punch him in the nuts.

“Tony.” There’s steel there now, full blown irritation. “Shut up.”

“Are you saying you’re not into that, Rogers? Oh come on. Bullshit.”

The couch yelps as Steve turns; Tony can feel the blast of his annoyance, his worn-down fury. “No, what’s bullshit is you being an asshole, Tony. Try to show a little goddamn respect!”

“Steve,” Peggy says. “Stop fighting for my virtue, hmm? That’s been gone a long time. And good riddance, really.” Her back arches and Tony realizes that she’s reaching, her slim, pretty fingers stretched out into that tiny strip of gray. “I’d much prefer if you did as Tony suggests. So very much, my darling. Will you do that for me?”

The air in that neat living room in goddamn New Jersey in 1975, it draws up tight, and for a split second, Tony has no idea where this is going, if the next thing he’s going to feel is Steve’s mouth or his fist.

“Baby,” he says, “c’mere. It’s ok.”

One heartbeat, two. A third. A deeply drawn breath.

“Oh, god.” Steve’s voice, a glass wobbling on an unsteady table. “Oh, god. Oh, god.”

And then he’s curled up against Peggy’s other side, pressing her back, and Tony’s petting his shoulder, the broad stretch of his shirt, his bicep.

“Darling,” she murmurs. No tears now. But something bolder, softer. “Come here.”

When their mouths meet, it’s a cosmic force, a supernova caught on a sofa, and beneath its heat, its blinding fucking light, Tony’s crushed. Peggy is alive in his arms, twisting, turning, pressing up and holding on and moaning with every breath, and beyond her, at the edge of Tony’s grasp, Steve is shaking, groaning, taking everything she gives him and greedily giving it back. Peggy’s holding on to Tony hard, her hand climbing up his thigh; it’s all Tony can do to hang on.

“Good boy,” Peggy says when they finally come up for air. “Now kiss Tony.”

Tony sits up and Steve crashes down and the kiss is a lightning bolt, a fever, a strike against all of the dark. The angle is off and Peggy’s pressed between them, panting, making the most beautiful sounds while her fingers flirt with Tony’s dick and it’s easier in the dark, is all this; easier to feel, easier to stay out of his head, easier to keep his mind on the two people beside him and away from their problems, all of them: the years apart, the homecoming, the blood and destruction and the accident that brought them to this. 

To Peggy’s lips against his throat. To the taste of Steve on her mouth, inside it. To the sound that Steve makes as he touches them both, his hands over their hearts, as they kiss.

To the crash of the coffee table as Steve shoves it back and scrambles to his knees on the floor. To the soft tear of Peggy’s blouse as she tugs at its buttons, to the full, sweet softness of her breasts. To the way she whimpers when they stroke them, four hands together; the way she moans when Steve laps at her nipples, the way Tony does when her hand closes over the trapped swell of his cock.

They can’t see each other, can only feel, and it’s a damned beautiful thing even before Steve kisses over and down Peggy’s chest, her stomach, and nuzzles the soft heat between her thighs.

“Steve,” she breathes, her hips lifting to meet his mouth. “Oh, darling, right there. That’s where I want you. Right there, fuck. Yes.  _ Yes _ .”

They’re in a space beyond time now, in a place where nobody can catch them. Where it could be 1944 or 2025 or even 197-fuckin-5, where’s it’s all of them at once. What matters is the slide of their skin against each other’s, the wet slide of their kisses, the sense Tony has way down in his gut that somehow, they’re home.

“Don’t stop,” Peggy begs when Steve lifts his head, when Tony reaches for the catch of her trousers. “God, please, my darlings, don’t stop.”

“Shhh,” Tony says against her neck, every inch of his body burning as Steve slides her trousers down, as Tony smooths his fingers over the damp pout of her panties. “We won’t, I promise. We won’t.”

She comes like that, right there on the couch in front of her big picture window. If the curtain were pulled back, if Tony switched on the lamp, any passing stranger might see them wound together like this, his mouth bent to her breasts and Steve’s easing over her pussy, his fingers at her entrance, teasing, his lips pursed over her clit, and when she breaks through, she claws at them both, howls like a rainstorm, cries thunder in both of their names.

She’s still moaning when Steve shifts on his knees, when he finds Tony’s zipper and frees his dick, jacks it, draws a blurt of wet from the fat tip.

“Oh fuck,” Tony gets out, “Steve, baby, oh shit--!”

And then even those words are gone, replaced full tilt by sensation of Peggy’s tongue stroking his as Steve swallows him to the hilt and then and then and then the darkness doesn’t matter, the shadows that hide their faces because Tony comes and Tony feels fucking loved, grounded by two sets of strong hands, and that, for now, for now, for this man out of time? That’s more than enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Maybe one more chapter here...


	3. Chapter 3

It happens like this: in time, they triumph. It doesn’t matter how; it doesn’t matter why. But there's some shit to tidy up first.

They pack up Steve’s papers and straighten up the basement.

They buy a bigger bed.

Tony learns things about Steve he’d never had time to notice before: how he likes his toast (OCD perfect golden), how he folds the newspaper into neat quarters as he reads, how softly he sighs when they get up before him and he walks in on them in the kitchen, Peggy’s thighs spread and her dressing gown open and Tony’s mouth on her breasts as she rides him, the chair creaking and both of them moaning and Steve standing in the doorway, watching, rubbing himself through his shorts and when she comes, they do, too--Steve in his hand and Tony tucked up inside her, grunting, the flutter of her cunt almost too much to bear.

“Shame on you,” Peggy says, still moving up and down on his dick and grinning at Steve, reaching for him. “Bad influences, both of you. I’m going to be late for work.”

Steve gets a job at the grocer’s because he needs something to do and wants to feel useful. Tony doesn’t, because fuck that. Instead, he learns how to cook. He gets a library card and _Mastering t_ _he Art of French Cooking_ and highly approves of the notion that a glass of wine is central to one’s success. Sometimes, Steve comes home for lunch and Tony’s already chopping shit for supper, covering the counter with neat bites of onions and carrots and celery.

“Oh, no,” Steve says, chuckling, “no way, babe. I’m not kissing you until you put down the knife.”

There are nights when Peggy gets home at midnight. Sometimes, she doesn’t come home at all. Sometimes, she drags them to bed the moment she walks in the door and that means she’ll be gone tomorrow on some mission or other, running around the sketchiest parts of the planet, gun drawn. On nights like that, supper goes stone cold because she wants to have both of them inside her, one after the other, wants to be so full that she’s dripping and they have to clean her up, have to, trading kisses as they lap at her cunt, and on nights like that, they cling to her, press her between them and reassure her that when she comes back, they’ll be there.

When she’s gone, Steve gets drawn up and worried, the first signs of wrinkles around the edge of his eyes. When she’s gone, Tony’s gut gets in a twist and he drinks more than he should, sometimes. When she’s gone, they make out on the couch until Tony’s hard in Steve’s fist and then they make love, stupid slowly, spread out on Peggy’s part of the bed, the smell of her perfume clinging to their skin.

“We gotta change the sheets,” Steve mumbles against Tony’s neck, after. “You spunked the hell out of these.”

“You say that like I didn’t have help, Peaches. You were pretty critical to said spunking. Dare I say you were the inciting incident.”

“Mmmm. Still. Clean sheets tomorrow. Don’t let me forget.” A sigh, a warm hand against his heart. “She deserves things to be nice when she gets back.”

He draws his fingers through Steve’s hair. Thinks about saying _she might not be back tomorrow, though_. Understands that Steve’ll just hear _she might not be back_.

“You’re right,” Tony says instead, softly. “She so does. And things'll be perfect when she gets back, yeah?”

It’s two more days before her key turns in the lock. It’s 10 o’clock in the morning and she has a black eye and Tony’s the only one home.

“Peggy, jesus! What the hell happened? Are you ok?”

She winces when he hugs her but doesn’t pull away. Hangs on tight.

“A cracked rib and some bruises,” she says. “They look a little nasty, but I’m all right. Mostly. I--”

She tips her head back and he can see the ache in her eyes, the pain, the kind that doesn’t come from the body. She’s seen some shit, some real fucking shit these last few days, he thinks.

“Tony?”

“Yes, honey?”

Peggy’s lids fold and her mouth opens beneath his. “Kiss me,” she says, the words thick. “God help me. Right now, I can’t talk.”

When he opens her blouse in the bedroom, the soft skin of her chest and belly is a garden of bruises, violent colors where there should be only cream. Her ribs are taped and she’s already wet for him, he can smell it. She pulls his hands to her breasts.

When they kiss, it’s with a kind of desperation he’s never felt in her before, and it does things to him, feeling her nails digging into his spine, the greedy arch of her hips, the unmistakable heat of her pussy behind too many fucking layers of cloth, and when he opens her up, he sits down on the edge of the bed and tugs her towards him and pushes his face between her thighs.

“Gently,” she whispers. There’s a hand in his hair, guiding. “Lick me gently, darling, come on. Use that sweet tongue of yours and get me there.”

He cups her ass and does as she asks, keeping each stroke of his tongue lighter, light. It’s not what he wants; he wants to devour her. He wants his beard to drip with her excitement and then plunge into her until she feels so good that she can’t remember that someone hurt her, that someone treated her beautiful body this way, that someone took the woman he loves, that Steve does, and brought her pain.

She claws at his shoulders, his old workaday plaid. “Good boy. Good, Tony, god, yes. _Yes_ , just like that.”

He knows she’s close when she whimpers and starts working her hips, shoving her cunt at his face, and that’s when he breaks the rules and sucks on her hard, the tip of his tongue working against her clit, furious, the way Steve does, the way she fucking likes it, and that whimper rolls up to a cry that shatters the mid-morning calm and her labia trembles when she comes, her folds shaking against his face and he sucks her again, groans, squirms on the bed like a teenager when she throws her head back and comes again, still, waves of pleasure that make his dick ache.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he says when he’s braced over her, his flushed dick on the edge of Valhalla.

“Good.” Her hand in his hair again, stroking. “I won’t let you, I promise. I won’t.”

*****

She’s still asleep when Steve gets home. Tony’s staring down a glass of Merlot.

“Something happened,” Tony says quietly as they stand in the doorway, watching her shoulders rise and fall. “Something bad, Steve, I don’t know. She wasn’t ready to tell me.”

Steve winds an arm around his waist, bless him, and takes on some of the weight. “She will when wants to, I guess. As is her way in all things.”

He says it very Steve-like, very square-jawed no nonsense, but Tony’s been around long enough to hear through that shit. “Can I say something rude and semi-patronizing?”

A snort. “Go ahead.”

“I hate that she does this. I fucking hate seeing her hurt.”

“Well,” Steve says, his mouth against Tony’s hair, “if it helps, imagine how bad the other guy looks. You’ve never seen her in a fight, Tone. If this guy whelped her, then believe me, Peggy kicked the shit out of him. Ten bucks says he got carried off in a body bag.”

“Seriously?”

Steve chuckles. “Because I love you, I’m not going to tell her you said that.”

Dinner’s nearly over by the time they hear her footsteps in the hallway, see the tattered flap of Steve’s robe wound around her.  She folds herself in Steve’s lap and kisses him without a word.

“Hi,” Steve says after a moment, his arms turning around terrycloth.

A tired smile. “Hello, darling.”

“We missed you.” 

Tony swallows. Christ, they’re beautiful together, even like this: Peggy exhausted and Steve’s forehead pinched with worry, both a little unsure. “Yeah," Tony says. "We sure did.”

Peggy sighs and leans her head against Steve’s shoulder, chestnut combed with silver and gray. “In the morning,” she says. “Is it alright if we talk about this in the morning? I need”--her eyes find Tony’s, and god, there’s something in them that’s so goddamn fragile--“I need to enjoy the comforts of being home with you first.”

Steve kisses her again, his hand turned around her face. “Of course, sweetheart. Of course.”

She stretches her arm across the table and finds Tony’s hand. He winds his fingers through hers. “Tony,” she says. “Come here.”

In a moment, he’s on his knees beside Steve’s chair and the three of them are kissing, mouths moving one to another, ping ponging, a sloppy sort of give and take, and they make her come like that, pitched perfect between them, Tony teasing her nipples and Steve’s big fingers in her cunt and her own hand on her clit, her lips, leaning back against Steve’s arm and pressing herself against Tony’s mouth and singeing the air with her sharp cry, one that Tony’s willing to bet the neighbors can hear because the kitchen window is open and that makes it all the sweeter, somehow, how much Peggy needs them both, how willing she is to show it, English decorum be damned.

“Well,” she says later, stretched out in bed beside them as they fuck, “they must not have thought too much of it, eh? No one seems to have called the police.” Her fingers climb down Tony’s spine as Steve pounds him and god help him if that doesn’t do it for him, isn’t just enough straw to break the proverbial back and having him shouting into the sheets. “That is, not yet.”

Tony dreams of Peggy covered in yellow and purple roses and of Steve’s hands, his, working frantically to shove them back.

 _It’s all right_ , dream-Peggy murmurs, flowers streaming from her mouth. _It’s all right, darlings. Drowning is part of the job_.

 _No_ , Tony tells her. He can see a shadow at Steve’s back, looming. _No, it isn’t!_

 _Oh, my dear_ . Peggy’s voice is there, but she isn’t, now. The shadow has swallowed her. The shadow is Steve. _It has been since long before you were born. You’ve forgotten, Tony--this isn’t your fight._

 _No_ , he says, certain, raising his hands against the darkness, light in his palms. _Now it is_.

*****

  
In the morning, they sit very still around toast and coffee. The window’s closed and everyone’s dressed. Peggy looks incredibly pale.

“For the last week,” she says, “I’ve been in Russia. Siberia.” Her eyes turn to Steve’s. “Something tells me you know what that means.”

Tony’s never seen anybody hit by a 10-ton weight, but damn if that’s not what Steve looks like. And based on Steve’s expression, it’s probably what he looks like, too. Because what the fucking fuck, unwelcome blast from the future past. _Siberia_? What the hell. What the everloving fuck?  She can’t mean--!

“You found Bucky,” Steve says, just like that.

Peggy’s fingers curl tight around her cup. “It seems we did, yes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just love these three together, ok?  
> (But where this actual plot came from, I have no idea...)


	4. Chapter 4

She shows them photographs, spills them out between the jelly jar and the toast, and it’s fucking eerie how much the images look like they marched straight out of Tony’s memory: those high, dark walls and the dim, weird light and the coldness of the place that had struck him the second that he stepped inside. Never mind the other horrors he’d found there--his parents’ deaths, Steve’s betrayal, a real and vivid desire to strike Steve down and watch him bleed into the concrete. The drive to kill Barnes had been bad enough, but that the same instinct for one horrible set of seconds had extended to Steve is just too goddamn awful to think about, thanks. 

Because it’d been the start of a quicksand of anger that hadn’t dried up until he’d torn his heart out and shoved it into Steve’s hands and he remembers the sensation of drowning in that moment, one drawn not just from a shortness of breath but from all the shit he hadn’t let himself feel for years tumbling down on his head and falling at Steve’s feet, gasping, he’d felt like something in him had finally broken and could finally, finally start to fucking heal.

And it had, ok, messily and with a lot of schmoopy talk and angry sex and then they’d gotten stuck in 197-fucking-5 while their reality (probably) ended and was it any wonder seeing those pictures made him feel legitimately sick?

“There were others,” Peggy says, her hand splayed on Tony’s back. “Others that were in cryostorage, ike Barnes. But their chambers had been damaged, somehow; a malfunction, maybe, or simply age. It looked like we were the first ones in the place for quite a while. His was the only tube that wasn’t covered in dust.”

“Did you open it?” Steve sounds strangled.

“No. It opened on its own. Part of a security system, we think.”

“How many people did you lose?”

Her shoulders slump a little. “Enough.”

Steve touches the bruises on her face, gently. “He did this, huh?”

“He did, yes.”

Tony asks what he knows Steve can’t. “Did you kill him?”

“No,” Peggy says, “but perhaps I should have. Then he wouldn’t have gotten to so many of my men, or gotten quite so many strikes at me.”

Steve makes a soft, hurt sound and she turns to him, kisses the inside of his wrist.

“It was my call, darling. I wanted him alive, even before I recognized his face. We’ve no idea if HYDRA has other facilities like that, and the technology on display there--what it must have taken to create even one like him, much less others--it’s essential that we understand it. No matter the personal cost.”

“You can’t contain him,” Tony says. Understatement of the decade. “He’ll bust out of the best prison you’ve got.”

“Tony’s right. He’s more dangerous than anything you’ve ever dealt with, Peg. There’s no way that you’re ready for him.”

She snorts and shuffles the photographs, black and white and color, all pictures of hurt. “Now how,” she says, “in God’s green earth do you know what I’ve dealt with, Steve, hmm? I’ve got 30 years on you, 30 years of the weird and the vile that never made it into any file.” Her voice is steel now, Early Gray. “And while a murderous super soldier with metal appendages who happens to be someone I know would for most people be the strangest thing that’s ever happened to them, for me, it doesn’t even make the top 10. So I don’t care what future you come from, darling; don’t either of you ever fucking presume to tell me how to do my job, all right?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Tony says, because he’s pretty sure that’s the right answer.

“Peggy,” Steve says, because god love him, he’s an idiot, “I didn’t mean to--”

Peggy stands up so fast the salt cellar goes tumbling. “Telling you about this was a courtesy. Dare I say a moment of weakness. And now I can see that it was a mistake, one I shan’t make again.” 

“I’m glad you told us.” Steve’s face is set, stubborn. “I think we can help.”

She sweeps the photos from the table, clutches them to her breast. “You’ve not heard a word I’ve said, have you, Rogers? Of course you haven’t. Christ!”

“I heard you fine. I just think what you’re saying doesn’t make any sense.”

Oh, Tony knows this dance. He’s jigged it a hundred times. Steve gets his back up and Steve runs his mouth and nobody leaves this pas de deux satisfied. It’s fucking weird to watch it from the outside.

Weirder still because Peggy has enough sense to do what Tony’s never been able to: to turn on her heel in the face of Steve Rogers’ rationally delivered outrage and walk the fuck away.

“What just happened?” Steve says when the front door slams, when they hear her car rev in the driveway. He looks honestly gobsmacked.

“You stuck your foot in a bear trap and then jammed it in your mouth and our Ms. Carter refused to help you pull it out.” Tony reaches for the last of the bacon. “Nice work, sport. Hell of a way to say _welcome home_.”

“But she doesn’t understand what she’s dealing with, Tony! You know that. I mean, we could barely deal with him 40 years from now.”

“Yeah,” Tony says, crunching, “but see, I may not know Peggy as well as you do, babe, but I do know that she got this far without our help--so why the fuck should she need it now? Mmm, spoiler alert: she doesn’t.”

Steve’s face is the color of raspberry jelly. It’s amazing. He’s never seen Steve this pissed off at somebody’s who’s not him. “Because she’s never dealt with the Winter Soldier before, and he’s--!”

“Steve.” Tony reaches out and pats the man’s hand, balled into a fist in the tablecloth. “Seriously. Let it go.”

Steve goes to work steaming and Tony turns on the radio and pulls out a pad and starts sketching out some home defense options, 1970s-style. You know, just in case.


	5. Chapter 5

It should probably bother him more, having the two people he loves mad as hell at each other, but in actual fact, it’s kind of entertaining. You can tell a lot about a person by the way they get angry. Take Steve: he’s had some serious observational experience there. Steve never gets red in the face, which is something else; five seconds of flirting or Tony’s batted eyelashes and he’s Heinz, but when the ol’ Rogers fury is churning, he’s a sheetcake: smooth and white and wide.

Where is does show, though, is in his hands. They curl into themselves and form, eh, not fists exactly, but claws tense enough to make Steve’s knuckles crack. And there’s a vein in his neck that gets going, too; you just have to know where to look.

Sometimes, it seems like Steve gets going too easy. That’s how it’s always felt to Tony. Like there were times beneath Mr. Rogers’ facade when there was hot water boiling just under the ice and all it took to push was a single sharp poke to make a crack and get the steam rising. It happened before they were stuck in 1970s New Jersey and it’s happened since: late library books and battle tactics, drinking what Steve thinks is too much--all of these things have earned him A Talk with Steve that’s spiraled into an argument. Zero to righteous in the same even tone.

But Peggy gets mad more like Tony does, the Pop Rocks sort of pissed: one big jolt, some shouting, and then a serious jones for loud makeup sex. There are things she gets prickly about--her ex-husband being primo example number one; also, Tony “borrowing” her car--but it takes a lot to get her angry, though. a lot more than Steve or Tony. Maybe, Tony thinks, because  she’s had to fight her whole life in a way they can’t really understand. That she’s had to demand respect and not have it granted seems ludicrous, knowing her, but that’s reality; everything she has, all that she’s built, she’s had to earn twice over. Which is why she doesn’t take shit from anyone and that is abundantly fucking clear; she draws clear lines and sets expectations and if you violate them--say, if you question her goddamn competency--then you understand (unless you’re Steve Rogers) that there will be proverbial hell to pay.

Except Steve is Steve and he Wants to Be Reasonable and he Wants to Persuade and Peggy will fucking have none of it and it’s goddamn fascinating because the longer it goes on--two days and counting--the more Peggy’s non-combatant status is clearly getting to Steve.

“She’s being unreasonable,” he tells Tony moodily as they watch  _ Sanford and Son _ . “Completely and utterly. I don’t get it. Peggy was always one to listen to logic.”

“Jesus, Steve.”

“What?”

“Why is this so hard for you to fucking grok, huh? The lady doesn’t need your logic. Don’t you get that? Whether you you like it or not, she’s gonna handle this her way, and who knows? Her way might be better. Fuck knows that we made a mess of it.”

Steve shifts, bumps Tony’s head where it’s tucked in his lap. “It’s not a question of liking it, Tone. It’s that I don’t want her getting hurt anymore than she already has been.”

“It’s not your job to protect her anymore. Crazy thought, hang on, yes--survey says: maybe it never was.”

“Ok,” Steve says softly. “Fine. But it’s Bucky.”

“Dare I say,” Peggy says the next afternoon when she gets home early, gets home and drags Tony away from the stove and backs him up onto the bed. “He’s being a sanctimonious prick.”

“Nah,” Tony wheezes. He grips her thighs tighter, looks up to marvel at the bounce of her tits. “I’ve seen sanctimonious. This is worry. He’s fucking worried sick about you, honey.”

She growls--a sound that makes his balls jerk--and reaches down to scrub at her clit. “About me? Or about Bucky?”

“Oh, jesus. Both, probably. I’d say both.”

“Well, why the fuck doesn’t he just say that? Hmm? Tell me that.”

She’s rippling around him and god, she’s so gorgeous like this: eyes burning and breasts flushed and so soft inside, Christ, so fucking tight and  _ soft _ .

“Tony?”

“Huh?”

Peggy pinches his nipples hard. “Where'd you go, hmm? You ready for me, is that it? You ready to come?”

“Yes. Oh, god, oh god,  _ yes. _ ”

A smirk, a greedy shift of her hips. “Then, goddamn. Why don’t you?”

“If it were anyone but Bucky,” she says, after, when he’s finished licking her clean and made her come on his tongue, “do you think he’d be acting like this?”

He nuzzles the crown of her head. “I dunno. Bucky is kind of the exception to every rule, in my experience.”

“What do you mean?”

So he tells her about Russia, all of it. Why they’d gone there separately, what they’d found together. How close they’d come to losing everything because of it. How long it’d taken them to reach for each other again.

“And you didn’t think to mention this until now, because…?”

“Because, I don’t know. I don’t like to think about it. And it wasn’t expressly relevant to how we ended up on your doorstep; to my mind, anyway. We told you the stuff that really mattered.”

Her fingers play across his ribs. “He chose Bucky over you.”

“He chose Bucky over everything.”

“God. I’m not sure I understand that.”

“I’m not sure Steve does, either, some days. But don’t tell him I said that. He hates being psychoanalyzed. He puts a lot of stock in knowing his own mind.”

Peggy sits up a little and balances her chin on his chest. “That’s funny. So do you.”

He touches her cheek. “I’m in full and constant contact with my nerouses, if that’s what you mean. We’re on good speaking terms. I got the house in the divorce and unsupervised visitation.”

When they kiss again, she’s smiling. It’s fucking intoxicating, the way she feels in his arms, petal soft and iron strong, the way she takes control and rolls on top of him, moans into his mouth, pushes him into the sheets.

“God, again? Already? Show me some mercy, woman.”

“Tsk. You like it.” Her slim fingers tease his cock. “You love it.”

“No,” Tony says, spreading his lips and his legs, “I love you."


End file.
